UnowPriceless
hyped garbage
Acensbart
Excellent but underrated film
Ava-Grace Willis
Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.
strawgert
Almost 2 hours out of my life HAD I decided to keep watching. Boring and stupid. They could've and should've used ordinary people who've never been in a movie and it just might have been interesting. I found the expected kind of silliness in this boring BS filled time-waster! This review does not contain any spoilers as it has nothing in it worth spoiling except the exposing of silliness, especially in the woman Sandra Bullock.
Predrag
Think back to 1995, did you even know what I.D. theft was? Well Michael Ferris and John Brancato did, and at the time, it wasn't really that scary. In the film, Sandra Bullock lives alone, spending most of her time fixing her company's computers online. She seems to rarely go out or socialize except with others by computer. She even orders her food over the computer, and it's delivered. Because she keeps to herself, hardly anyone knows her personally, and her mother is in a nursing home with Alzheimer's Disease, so she doesn't remember her. Her only friend is an ex boyfriend, who happens to be a psychiatrist, and she's broken up with him. The fact that she's so incognito has a lot to do with the film. Before leaving for her first vacation in years, she get's a call from a friend in her company who is confused about a weird disk that's come into his possession, and wants her to help him. Not willing to figure it out over the phone or on the computer, he tells her he needs to see her in person and he's flying to her home in L.A. He never arrives...The cast is great, with Sandra Bullock pulling out all the stops in her fight for what is right. There are no sex scenes, no violence or over-indulgent special effects, just content. Every movie lover should own a copy of this film as an example of how to make a film without over indulgence and heavy reliance on effect.. This is a film that can be viewed several times, with each time revealing a little more detail. There is less obvious comedy and glamour in this role, but Sandra Bullock is excellent and intense, as the woman fighting for her life, and ends on a happy note caring for her Mother, and with a new status, working from a new home. There were a lot of conspiracies in this movie, in my opinion its a film that makes you really think how controlled your life is by the internet. Very compelling story.Overall rating: 8 out of 10.
John Hope
Why a rating of 5? Because 10 stars go to to Sandra's black bikini... To be more precise, to Sandra's wonderful body and her amazing face shot in close up. 0 stars go to everything else, especially the way they present software. I suppose that the at the time Apple managers sponsored the film, just to destroy their own brand: A computer network that's so easy to hack and that lies about everything was not the best way to promote Apple... Thanks God Steve Jobs returned back and stopped immediately those ultra expensive, self destroying ad campaigns. If you love Sandra Bullock, watch this movie, it's worth it. Otherwise forget it.
seymourblack-1
The mid-1990's was an exciting time when the use of the Internet grew rapidly and it became obvious to everyone that it would soon affect virtually every area of human activity. Alongside the excitement, however, many anxieties were expressed about the potential dangers involved and many of these feature in this movie which presents the kind of nightmare scenario that many people feared. Identity theft, a breakdown of social interaction and cyber-terrorism were all recognised threats and are used to good effect in "The Net" to create a fast-moving thriller that was very topical at the time of its release but now inevitably looks dated.Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock) is a computer analyst who works at her home in Venice, California where she identifies and eliminates viruses in programs that are sent to her by San Francisco software company, "Cathedral Systems". When one of her colleagues sends her a program that makes it easy to access and modify data held by government departments, airports, hospitals and banks etc, she's told that he'll soon be travelling down to her home to work with her on the program. Shortly after, he's killed in a plane crash and so she continues with her original plan to go on vacation to Mexico and takes her laptop and a disk containing the new program that she'd been asked to work on.In Mexico, she meets a smooth-talking man called Jack Devlin (Jeremy Northam) who seduces her but is really only interested in stealing her disk and killing her. When this becomes obvious, Angela manages to escape but after returning home, discovers that her house has been put up for sale and her identity has been swapped with a woman called Ruth Marks who's apparently a criminal wanted by the police. It swiftly becomes evident that Angela's being pursued by a group of cyber-terrorists called "The Praetorians" and the police and can't prove her real identity because she has, for many years, led a reclusive lifestyle in which her only regular face-to-face contact was with her mother who has Alzheimer's disease.The only person that Angela knows who could confirm her identity is her ex-psychiatrist and ex-lover, Dr Alan Champion (Dennis Miller) and although he provides some help, he's soon prevented from getting Angela out of her nightmare and she remains on the run until she eventually confronts Devlin for the final time.There are plenty of chases and well-executed action sequences in "The Net" and Hitchcockian influences such as , the wrong man (woman) theme, the fairground motif and confused identities as well as a disk that becomes the MacGuffin, add extra interest. The power of the terrorists seems overwhelming and an atmosphere of paranoia prevails when amongst other things, the modification of key computer records result in the deaths of a prominent politician, a hospital patient and a software expert who's piloting a plane.The focus throughout the entire story is on Sandra Bullock's character and her skill in making herself convincingly introverted and work-obsessed plays a huge part in the success of this movie as she outshines everyone else who appears in it.
